Usually my Touch2Touch posts develop from a thought, a quote, a poem, an event. This time, though, I just want to share an image with you. Nothing profound or significant, just an image of a brick wall.
I took this photo of the wall for the same rationale often attributed to mountaineers for climbing mountains, “because it was there.” It was there, and in this ordinary parking lot nothing much else was available. But somehow, when I looked at it in the computer, this blank brick wall delighted something inside me. I still don’t know what, but it doesn’t matter, does it? I think we’ve all had this experience, of finding something we didn’t even know we were looking for.
This is the original image — almost. Because in pastel New England I miss so achingly the brilliant colors of even decaying walls in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, I couldn’t resist the temptation to kick it up a notch. In real life the image is slightly faded, like the old wall of this abandoned and restored silk mill building that now houses various practitioners of high-tech medicine to cure all our ills (until, of course, it doesn’t).
Grateful as I am to modern medicine — after all, it saved my life not so long ago — I think it is beauty, beauty of all kinds, even the beauty of decay, that may be the true mundi medicina, the medicine of the world.
(What do you think heals and saves the world?)
Touch2Touch 
What a wonderful post and I couldn’t agree more. There is beauty everywhere and in everything if we only look…
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Thanks, Maurizio. It’s absolutely true — although I find that I have to look with the right eyes. Unjudging eyes, sometimes.
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Oh, you’re on to something there. When one can still see beauty, one has a life worth living. And I think, even if one can’t see, but only sense, that there is beauty in the world (Helen Keller comes to mind), then the world holds promise for that person. There should be a place in Maslow’s hierarchy for the recognition of beauty, perhaps right down there at the bottom of that pyramid along with sleep and food and sex 🙂
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I went and looked up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and think you’re perfectly right. Beauty is ignored anywhere in the pyramid, but like you I think it might be right down there foundationally as a physiological need.
If it’s never named as important, people don’t realize what the ache is for —
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My eye went right to the spot where the brick is missing. Hmmmmm?
I can see why you were ‘delighted’. The sea green of the pole and the earthiness of the brick go well together.
I think the fact that some of us are still kind, polite, caring, and patient with one another is saving us, but we are on the brink. The numbers need to grow and the anger and scariness are overwhelming to me. ;-( We need to change the tide.
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Oh, don’t we ever, Gemma!
Kindness is as basic as beauty, but both qualities are usually forgotten and/or ignored!
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I’m with Gemma – we’re on the brink. Just reading heated comments attached to some political statements that have cropped up on my Facebook page made me cringe. Kindness and beauty – they seem to have been discarded by a populace that sorely needs them both.
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😦
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We all go to that place, sometimes – you know, when things just aren’t right, when maybe our spirits are a little faded and in disrepair. And then someone points out the beauty: right there, right in front of your eyes. That’s what heals and saves us, I think. Being able to see the beauty of the world vicariously through someone else when maybe we can’t.
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Oh, yes, Jen!
You remind me of the many times in my life when I held on because I used someone else’s strength, faith, and courage to do so —
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well, you know I would agree with your conclusion. Walking in beauty heals us and spreads to others as well. You do that exquisitely.
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Thank you —
*blush*
Your motto is inspirational, Joss.
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Like some of your earlier commenters (and thinking of a previous post of yours), my thoughts went first to kindness. I think kindness is the medicine we need, while beauty feeds our souls.
I love that picture too, for the colours and textures!
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Thinking about your comment, Karen —
and just having made an overnight trip with a bunch of other wrinklies —
I think that a habit of kindness eventually lends a beauty to a face, and that is one measure of health. Some people are mostly kind, some are mostly not, and it shows over time. It’s a melding of body and soul, maybe.
Make sense? Just an initial response —
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As fading as beauty might be it’s inner light will always shine through with, as you say, kindness guiding the way!
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Sometimes the fading is part of the beauty. It just needs a slight eye adjustment.
🙂
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Quite often I feel this way about pictures I took for no good reason at all. When I bring them up on the screen, something might resonate in me …and that could be just some weed, the bark of a tree. With all the meanness of this world, it feels important to focus on the beauty in nature … the first colts foot of Spring … the reddening leaves of Autumn …the circle of life. It has hope.
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Yours is the second comment I’ve read today which talks about the healing power of nature, and how it gives meaning and hope.
“What you hear two times, is true.” I believe it is a message, for sure.
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